The Girl from Samarcand by E. Hoffmann Price

As her guest set the dainty bone china cup on the onyx-topped, teak tabouret and sank back among the embroidered cushions, Diane knew to the syllable the words which were to filter forth with the next breath of smoke; for three years as Hammersmith Clarke's wife had convinced her that that remark was inevitable.

"My dear, where did you ever get those perfectly gorgeous rugs?"

And Diane, true to form, smiled ever so faintly, and luxuriated in the suspicion of a yawn: the ennui of an odalisk hardened to the magnificence of a seraglio carpeted with an ancient Feraghan rug, and hung with silken witcheries from the looms of Kashan. Diane saw the wonder permeate her friend's soul and heard it surge into words.

"The rugs? Why -- well, I married them along with Ham, you might say. Yes, they are rather pretty, aren't they? But they're an awful pest at times -- -- "

"Naturally," agreed Louise, who lived in a loft in the Pontalba Building, where she could look down into the Plaza where Jackson reins in his brazen horse and lifts his brazen hat in salutation to the French Quarter of New Orleans. "You simply couldn't let the maid clean -- -- "

"Maid? Lord help us, but I daren't touch them myself! I tried it, once. That heaven-sent prayer-rug" -- Diane indicated an ancient Ghiordes, a sea-green splendor worth more than his right eye to any collector -- "looked a bit dingy. And Ham caught me at it. What was left of my hair just fell short of a close shingle. Do you know, one day I caught him filling the bathtub with milk -- -- "

"What?"

"Precisely. Seems some expert claimed a milk bath improves the luster. So the little Bokhara -- that blood-red creature beneath your feet -- got a treatment fit for a Circassian beauty. I'm just waiting for him to bring home a duster of bird-of-paradise plumes for this venerable wreck."

Diane stroked what was left of the peachblow, sapphire and gold nap of an age-old Senna woven on a silken warp.

"The truth of it is," continued Diane, "I feel guilty of bigamy. The man was married to his rugs long before he ever met me. 'Member how we speculated on the pros and cons of polygamy the other day at Arnaud's? Well, here I am, one lone woman competing with a dozen odd favorites, and a new rival added to the harem every so often."

"Good lord, Diane, what next! You are unique. Why, one would think you were jealous of them."

"Well, I am!"

"Outlandish as that fantastic husband of yours. I don't know which is the more _outré_, his mania for these beautiful things with the impossible names, or your -- heavens above, it does really seem like resentment against them. Now, if you'd married Peter" -- Louise laughed metallically -- "he'd never have given you time to be jealous of a _rug_."

"That's just it," flared Diane. "I could forgive flirtations and black eyes, and a reasonable degree of non-support. But these damned rugs -- look at that!"

Diane dug her cobraskin toe into the closely worn nap of the Feraghan carpet.

"Look at it! Just a rug, the first time. But live with it day after day. See the witchery sparkling in it at sunset. Catch yourself losing yourself in the thrill of its three hundred years, wondering that all the ecstasy ever lost in the entire world could be imprisoned in a rug. Then see your one and only and otherwise adequate husband sitting of an evening, hours at a stretch, staring at it and dreaming of all the richness and glamor he's lost through becoming civilized, learning to wear shoes, and having only one woman, and she his wife, about the house. Yes, I called you up to have you listen to me get the indignation out of my soul. The truth of it is, Lou, that if I don't get out of this atmosphere soon, I'll go utterly mad. Some day I'm going to move in on you in your attic -- anything to get away from all this!"

"Do you mean to say," began Louise with wide-spaced deliberation, "that you'd actually leave Ham because he likes to mess and poke around with his rugs, and spend most of his waking moments talking about them? Honestly, now -- -- "

"Good Lord, I could stand his _talking_ about them. But" -- Diane shuddered -- "Lou, he _loves_ them. Sits there, transfigured, like a saint contemplating the dewdrop glistening in the lotus cup."

"When I suggested, over at the Iron Gate, that you move in with me, I didn't know that you were married -- they all called you _la belle Livaudaise_, and you were the life of everything -- and least of all, I never suspected anyone had you enshrined in magnificence like this. Better think it over, Di -- I've been through the mill, and I _know_."

Diane from the first had been fascinated by the exotic atmosphere in which Clarke had planted her after their marriage; but in the end, seeing how they had become a part of him, she half consciously hated them and their everlasting song of Bokhara and Herat of the Hundred Gardens: an unheard song to which Clarke listened, and replied in unspoken syllables. And thus it was that Diane learned that to live in Clarke's apartment would be to become an accessory to those precious fabrics that were his hard-ridden hobby; for no woman would fit into the dim, smoky shadows of that titled salon unless bejeweled and diaphanously veiled she could dance with curious paces and gestures beneath the sullen glow of the great brazen mosque lamp as became the favorite of a khan in far-off Tartary. From the very beginning, Diane fought to keep her individuality untainted by the overwhelming personality of those damnably lovely fabrics from Shiraz and the dusty plains of Feraghan.